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The Flowering of the Renaissance. Vincent Cronin
Читать онлайн.Название The Flowering of the Renaissance
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008106171
Автор произведения Vincent Cronin
Издательство HarperCollins
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published by Collins 1969
First issued in Fontana 1972
Copyright© Vincent Cronin, 1969
Vincent Cronin asserts the moral right to be identified as the Author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780006530435
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780008106171
Version: 2014–07–21
Contents
Appendix A: Italian Currencies
Appendix B: Character and an Anti-Classical Style
Appendix C: The Whereabouts of Works of Art Mentioned in the Text
DURING the fifteenth century, in Florence, a small group of laymen cross-bred Christianity with the best elements of classical Greece and Rome to produce a new way of life which may be termed Christian humanism. This set high value on political freedom, public-spiritedness and free enquiry, on man’s will and imagination, on the beauty and power of the human body which, like all created things, was conceived not as God’s enemy but as His ally, and as an expression of His love. The Christian humanists took a new interest in man as a whole and, as a means of fathoming man’s nature, in literature and the arts, in history and in science. They viewed life no longer as a vale of tears, but as a quest for enlarging man’s powers, and so his awareness of God. They adopted a generous attitude to the views of pagan antiquity and to unorthodox thinkers such as Origen; they even drew near to tolerance in matters of conscience.
The Christian faith still came first with these early humanists, and in the most famous library of the day the Bible was bound in gold brocade, classical writers in silver. But inevitably there was tension. The pagan lion and Christian lamb do not lie down easily together, and though Plato and the Gospels may be made to harmonize, the balance is delicate. At the end of the fifteenth century Christian humanism came under attack from within, when Savonarola denounced it as a pagan